Beatrice Baxter Ruyl (1879-1961) was born in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Joseph Nickerson and Edith (Shedd) Baxter. She studied at the Museum School in Boston and later in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and with Edward Steichen (1900-1901). She and her husband, artist Louis Ruyl, lived in Hingham, Mass. and summered in Ogunquit, Maine where she was a member of the Ogunquit Art Association and a student and friend of its leading light, painter Charles Woodbury, whose son the Ruyl’s daughter Ruth would later marry. In addition to Little Indian Maidens at Work and Play, Ruyl wrote and/or illustrated Six Giants and a Griffin, and Other Stories (1903), Little Mildred’s Secret (1904), Bobby and Bobbinette (1904), The Moon Party (1904), and The Zodiac Birthday Book (1910). She also worked as an illustrator for The Boston Herald. Ruyl and her husband were friends with Pictorialist photographers F. Holland Day and Gertrude Käsebeir. A strikingly beautiful woman, she was photographed by both. A number of their photographs of her can be viewed online, at moma.org, for instance, or www.rijksmuseum.nl, or www.tumblr.com.

The Ruyls visited the Zuni Pueblo in 1902—a relatively early date for a woman artist from the east to visit one of the New Mexico pueblos. Although working more as a visiting illustrator, Ruyl can nevertheless be seen as a forerunner of the better-known women artists who arrived in New Mexico in the succeeding decades, such as Catharine Critcher, Henriette Wyeth, Louise Crow, Dorothy Brett and Georgia O’Keefe. With respect to the era in which she was working, Ruyl’s Zuni Pueblo illustrations have, at least in terms of subject matter and the market for which they were intended, much in common with those of Edwin Willard Deming for such works as Indian Child Life (1899), Little Indian Folk (1899) and Little Red Folk (1899), although they are, of course, stylistically very different.